Sustainable businesses - Is your company ready for The Conscious Consumer?

The Conscious Consumer is here. Maybe you have not yet met one of them but, be assured you will as they are here to stay. The Conscious Consumer will, in milder expressions, stop buying your products, and in stronger cases will actually campaign to discredit you and brand you for life as a social exploiter and environmental plunderer.

You may think that with some clever communication campaigns and flashy ads you will be able to fool The Conscious Consumer, allowing you to continue with your business with little consideration to social and environmental issues. Beware that if you try this approach, it is very likely that you will be fooled yourself. The Conscious Consumer is generally highly educated and critical, and can easily detect such trickery. And then you will be labelled as a greenwasher and a corporate liar. It is a dark road from there onwards.

But what to do? How to address the desires of consumers who not only want to buy products, but want their purchases not to cause harm or actually do good to society? How to run your business to respond to the demands of The Conscious Consumer, who is gradually becoming and will necessarily become the expression of society one day?

First of all, broadly recognize that sustainability is a fundamental part of your business, with its social, environmental and, as I am sure you already have, economic dimensions. Acknowledge that without sustainability, your business is something of a 21^st century pirate, taking away from people their rights to decent working conditions, livelihood and a clean and healthy environment.

Secondly, look at your business and evaluate what your main sustainability challenges are, considering your core business and the seriousness of the issues involved. There are different ways of doing this, varying with the size and nature of your business. The important thing is that you clearly allocate the responsibility for sustainability issues inside your company and then send a very clear message that the top management is behind it. Sustainability in businesses usually entails a change in corporate culture, which takes time and requires consistent signals from the CEO of a company.

The next step is then to develop your strategy on how your company will tackle the challenges and make use of the opportunities that are involved in incorporating sustainability into your business. This should be clearly linked to your core business and not to be confused with community support activities your company may do. However important and commendable such activities may be, your sustainability commitment really starts in your core business.

Dialogue and engagement with the main stakeholders related to the issues identified is fundamental in this process. Of particular value are discussions with NGOs. You may find that, contrary to common belief, they can actually be good partners, provided you are genuine in your willingness to listen and your interest and commitment to sustainability are sincere.

A large part of being prepared for The Conscious Consumer is to become such a consumer yourself. Any business in the world will consume inputs, from materials to energy and even services. Explore the issue with your suppliers and see where they stand in the process of incorporating sustainability in their own processes. And if they are not serious in this commitment, find new suppliers because social and environmental liability is something that carries through the supply chain, from a reputational point of view, but also increasingly legally.

For this purpose, and also for the purpose of demonstrating your own commitment to the issues important to The Conscious Consumer, you can make use of the growing movement of social and environmental voluntary standards. These are standards developed to allow businesses to make a social and/or environmental claim regarding their processes or products and are usually associated to a form of third party certification. You probably have seen many of them already in the products you buy and common examples are organic or fair trade labelled products.

The challenge here is that there is a growing diversity of different certification systems, with many overlaps and redundancies between them. They also vary widely in terms of scope and complexity. Unfortunately, there are also some "let's keep the status quo" certification systems, usually developed as a way to counteract the growing influence of the credible ones.

But how do you, to some extent a newcomer in this area, can differentiate between these different certification systems out there and choose the best one(s) for your business?

Here are few simple questions that can help guide you through this diversity of certification schemes:

a) What are the main sustainability issues associated to your core business? What are the certification standards that cover these issues?

b) Who participates in or supports the different certification systems? If a system is supported by key NGOs, that is usually a sign of its credibility.

c) Who constitutes the governance of the system? Make sure to explore the background of the NGOs involved. An industry association or landowner's association being classified as an NGO is not a very good sign. Also, as a general rule, keep away from systems that are industry heavy on their governance. They tend to reinforce the status quo, which unfortunately is not yet sustainable business.

d) How are the system's standards developed? Credible systems usually have strong participatory processes for developing their standards, including the decision making level.

e) How are the standards verified on the ground? Credible certification systems associated with social and/or environmental claims should have rigorous third party verification.

f) What is the information on the impacts on the ground of a given certification system? This is the ultimate question to assess the credibility of any given scheme. There are still big gaps on this area, but information on the impacts from these systems is constantly improving.

To put it even more simply, one could say that the principle behind credible certification systems is reward the best, improve the rest, while the approach of other schemes is to fight the best, reward the rest.

Incorporating sustainability in your business is not necessarily difficult. It is something that usually takes time and involves a change in corporate culture. Approach it with strong top management commitment and a willingness to engage with other parties and listen to what they have to say and you will be well on track. There is also a lot that has already been developed in many business sectors, so make sure you use what is out there.